With added salt...

Hello everyone.  Welcome back to a busy week here at Words and Pictures.  After yesterday's romantic canvas for my Our Creative Corner DT piece, I'm here with my inspiration offering for the new theme at Fun With ATCs.  The challenge for this fortnight is to create a Trio of ATCs - with a clear connection between the three of them... and each of them only 2.5 x 3.5 inches in size, remember.  Can't wait to see what you get up to with this one.

Do hop over to Fun With ATCs to see the trios created by my fabulous team-mates, but before you go, here's my starter for ten... or here are my starters for ten...

When I was plotting my make for this challenge, I was thinking I'd go rusty and grungy (in the style of my Rough Around The Edges tag), using some of the bits and pieces I'd rusted up the previous week.  But as you can see, things changed a bit in the making!

I'd been meaning to have a play with adding salt to some inks for ages, after seeing fabulous results at Maria's Knutselsplezier and, with the deadline for the make ticking ever nearer, I just wasn't in a rusty kind of mood.  So I splashed out into colour.

I started out at a grungy point, cutting my trio of words out of corrugated card, using the Movers and Shapers dies.  But when the colour kicked in, the corrugated card had to change.










I gave it a couple of coats of white paint, but that somehow wasn't enough, and in the end I embossed it all over with Wow Bright White embossing powder.  That gave me a glossiness which did the trick.

I spritzed and sprayed some ATC dividers (grabbed as they were being sold off... they're a little bigger than ATCs, obviously, so I had to trim them down afterwards) with lots of Dylusions sprays, and sprinkled rock salt and a bit of table salt on and left it all to dry. 

Very cool!

But as I was scraping the salt off afterwards, I noticed how beautifully it had soaked up the inky colours... can't throw that away, can we? And further ideas started to bubble.













So I deliberately dyed some more salt... 















I made little piles and spritzed them with the specific colours I was after.
















Also very cool!

Then it was down to assembling the ATCs themselves.  

I glued pairs of the trimmed dividers back to back... 













Once the white corrugated words were in place, you couldn't see that much of the amazing crystallisation.














So the rear side of each ATC gives you that in all its glory.













Gluing the salt gave me a couple of headaches, as it showed a slight tendency to want to dissolve in the glue rather than stick to it.  But we got there eventually.

I added some seam binding, also dyed with Dylusions sprays... and each ATC got the colour-way to complete the set.













So, for example, if it's red/blue on the front and green/blue on the back, it got the red/orange ribbon to finish it off. Does that make sense?













There's a touch more embossing powder top and bottom, and some doodling round the edges with a white gel pen, and we're all done.









So that's my unexpectedly colourful offering for you today.  Thank you so much for stopping by.  I hope you'll come and play along with us at Fun With ATCs, and I look forward to seeing you soon either here or elsewhere in Craftyblogland.

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
Rumi

You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
Dr Seuss

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.
Christopher Reeve

I'd like to enter this in the Good to be Green challenge over at Simon Says Stamp and Show (or Simon Says Stamp's Monday Challenge, as I understand it's now called!) - both for the greens involved, and for the recycled cardboard packaging.




Oh, and if you want a breakdown of which Artistic Outpost stamp sets were involved in yesterday's romantic canvas, you'll find me over there today too with all the details.

If I'd given you the whole lot in yesterday's mammoth post, we'd still be here now!